Page 43 of Barely a Woman
The door closed as softly as it had opened. Steadman stood alone long enough to taste bitter regret. Then he returned to his room, hopeful for some rest before what promised to be a long night, but not confident he would find any.
***
Morgan had waited hours for Steadman’s return, barely daring to move. Every human emotion played a role in the theater of her imagined scenarios. Soaring hope and joy if he had meant the passion behind his kiss. Crushing sorrow if he were to explain away his action as nothing more than playacting for the mission. When he finally arrived, neither scenario occurred. Instead, he gave hernothing. No joy, no sorrow. Just empty air, as if the kiss had been a figment of her fevered imagination.Stay in your room, he had said. As if he were her father—yet another man determined to keep her locked in place. The lack of the kiss’s mention left her woefully disappointed, but she did Steadman’s bidding by remaining behind a locked door.
During the long hours of the afternoon, though, her mood began to shift. As the sun fell toward the tree line, a phoenix began rising within Morgan from the ashes of her self-regard. And it wanted to fly. With renewed determination, she donned her coat and hat and left the inn. She settled against the side wall of a shop across the road from the inn to watch for Steadman. As a Bow Street investigator, she still had a duty to fulfill. The eyes of officers long dead watched over her, waiting to see if she would rise to the challenge. She vowed not to fail them.
After perhaps an hour, when darkness began bathing the buildings huddled along the road, Steadman left the inn on foot and in disguise. Calling on every tactic she had learned from him the previous few days, she pursued. His path carried him to the tavern where he disappeared inside. She waited again. Within minutes, he reappeared with the same men who had menaced the tavern the previous evening. A wave of concern rippled through her at the sight. What if this was a trap? What if they harmed him? And how could she stand against them? Thoughts of the pistols languishing in Steadman’s room rattled through her head.
The men seemed not to notice her following as they made a short journey to an old tack shed. A large hay hauler waited in front, hitched to a pair of nonchalant draft horses waiting patiently while picking at tufts of grass. She watched as the gang moved bags of what she assumed to be wheat from the shed into the wagon bed. They worked efficiently and in near silence, short of instructions barked from time to time by Three-Finger Jack. Within half an hour, the men piled onto the wagon, and it lurched into motion along the western road away from Broad Chalke. Where were they going? And how far? Though bereft of a horse, Morgan made the impulsive decision to follow on foot.
She struggled in the darkness, stumbling several times on unseen ridges of rut and road as she tried to keep pace. As the road began to bend, she found Orion in the sky to mark her bearings. Getting lost in strange countryside at night would be a poor outcome of her surveillance. Meanwhile, the wagon moved onward, minute by minute. Her breaths were coming in heaves when the hauler turned off the main thoroughfare onto a lesser road ahead. She cut through a leveled field to intersect the new course, her thighs burning from the effort. If the journey were to last much longer, she would not be able to continue.
As if in answer to unspoken prayer, the wagon slowed when it rolled through a small, darkened tenant village. She entered the stand of buildings behind the men, passing four low stone houses and a small chapel before halting in the deeper shadow of a sprawling oak. The wagon had stopped before a large barn. Lantern light from the inside the barn cast a glow through the open door to create a pool of amber around the wagon. As the men moved the bags from wagon to barn, she kept her attention on Steadman. He blended in with the others, moving the heavy sacks with the grunting fortitude of a field hand. The gang leader offered him a respectful slap on theshoulder as he muscled yet another bag into the barn. As the wagon began to empty, she became convinced of his safety—for the time being.
She backed away from her vantage point, slipped past the chapel and through the abandoned tenant village, and again cut across the field. She hurried along the road, casting backward glances for signs of the wagon. After a time, it emerged along the road and began to gain on her. She scrambled into the stubble of the field and dropped to her belly in the musky soil. The soft glow of light from the tavern was visible in the distance when the wagon passed by her. The men were now laughing and joking, their clandestine operation finished for the night. As the wheels rolled by, not twenty feet from her hiding place, she heard Steadman regaling the men with a story that was likely true. She followed the laughter into Broad Chalke and circled to the inn. After a weary trudge up the stairs, she saw no light from beneath Steadman’s door. Good! He had not yet returned.
Once in her room, Morgan washed the sweat and grime from her face and body as best she could. She had just finished when a tap sounded on her door. Throwing a blanket around her, she carefully approached the door.
“Who’s there?”
“Steadman.”
In the breath of a moment before she opened the door, a dismal thought struck her. What if he shared nothing of what had happened? What if he dismissed her from the investigation altogether? With rising angst, she creased open the door to find him standing in the hallway, still wearing his ruffian garb.
“What is it?”
His eyes wandered from the blanket to her face, deep with relief. “I simply wished to look in on you.”
To make sure I remain in my place?Umbrage straightened her spine. “Why did you wish to look in on me?”
He blinked with mild surprise. “I was merely concerned for your safety.”
“Why? Why are you concerned?”
He appeared to catch a dose of her umbrage. “Because I like you, God help me.”
“Oh, you do?” She opened the door further and stepped toward him in confrontation. “You like me? Despite the fact that I am a woman, a creature you have repeatedly pledged to hold at arm’s length?”
His irises glinted in the light of her candle as his eyes widened. His jaw fell open briefly before the alarmed expression relaxed. “You ask difficult questions.”
“So, you refuse to answer?”
“For now, yes. If nothing else than I have already said too much.”
Disappointment settled again into her breast, and she sighed. “At least tell me what happened tonight.”
She waited for him to dismiss the question or invent a tale. He did neither. “I met the gang, and we moved extorted wheat from a location in town to a barn in a tenant’s village some two miles distant.”
Her disappointment abated slightly. He had told the truth. However, he was not finished.
“And I know that village, and to whom it belongs.”
The sharp crease in his forehead told her everything. “Lord Atwood?”
“The very one.”
“Then he is absolutely behind the extortion?”
